Paper for DISCOURSE & COMMUNICATION

Paper for DISCOURSE & COMMUNICATION

‘MIXING’ AND ‘BENDING’: THE RECONTEXTUALISATION OF DISCOURSES OF SUSTAINABILITY IN INTEGRATED REPORTING

Dr. Franco Zappettini & ProfessorJeffrey Unerman

School of Management

Royal Holloway, University of London

Egham, Surrey UK TW20 0EX

Version3.1 submitted 21 February 2016

Short title for running head: ‘The Recontextualisation of Sustainability in Integrated Reporting’

Word count: 9111

ABSTRACT

Since their emergence, discourses of sustainability have been widely resemioticised in different genres and have intertextually merged with other discourses and practices. This paper examines the emergence of Integrated Report (IR) as a new hybrid genre in which, along with financial information, organisations may choose to report the social and environmental impacts of their activities in one single document. Specifically, this paper analyses a selected sample of IRs produced by early adopters to explore how discourses of sustainability have been recontextualised into financial and economic macro discourses and how different intertextual/interdiscursive relations have played out in linguistic constructions of ‘sustainability’. We contend that, by and large, the term sustainability has been appropriated, mixed with other discourses and semantically ‘bent’ to construct the organization itself as being financially sustainable i.e. viable and profitable and for the primary benefit of shareholders. From this stance, we argue that, through the hybridity of IR, most companies have primarily colonized discourses of sustainability for the rhetorical purpose of self- legitimation.

Keywords: Recontextualisation, Interdiscursivity, Genre Analysis, Sustainability, Accountability, Corporate Social Responsibility, Accounting, Integrated Reporting, Hybridity, Critical Discourse Analysis, Discourse Historical Approach, Semantic Bending, Financial Communication.

Short bionotes

Franco Zappettini is a Researcher in the School of Management at Royal Holloway where he co-investigateswith Professor Unerman the construction of sustainability in organisational discourses and accounting practices. He holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of London. He is also a Guest Lecturer of English in the Department of Education at the University of Genoa, Italy.He has published in discourse journals on the subjects of language, European identity, and transnationalism.

Jeffrey Unerman is Professor of Accounting and Corporate Accountability and Head of the School of Management at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research and public policy work focuses on the role of accounting and accountability practices in helping organizations become more sustainable.He has published extensively on accountability and sustainability issues in world’s leading accounting academic journals and in books.

1Introduction: the genesis of discourses of sustainability and the emergence of Integrated Reporting as a hybrid genre

Early records of terms equivalent to sustainability are found in the context of forest resources management in the German Nachhaltigkeit or ‘lastingness’ (von Carlowitz 1713 quoted in Van Zon, 2002), in the French durabilite´ and the Dutch duurzaamheid (Van Zon, 2002).Whilst in English, the term sustainable has been used in the sense of ‘bearable’ since 1610s and in the sense of ‘defensible’ since 1845, the meaning of ‘capable of being continued at a certain level’ made its first appearance in 1965 (Oxford English Dictionary). Du Pisani (2007) sees this latest use of the term ‘sustainable’ historically emerging as a counter discourse to the Enlightenment narrative of progress and modernity that has been appropriated since the 18th century to support neoliberal and capitalist arguments for economic growth and material advancement of production. In particular, for Du Pisani, discourses of sustainability emerged in the field of environmental studies in the wake of an increased awareness about ecological issues fostered, inter alia, by green movements in the 1960s which questioned the logic of growth. This notion of sustainability was captured by a pool of scientists and economists (the Club of Rome) who warnedin a seminal report called ‘The limits to growth’ (Meadows, 1972) about a scenario of world population increasingly unable to cope with finite resources.

Since publication of the UN-commissioned Bruntdland Report in 1987 (WCED, 1987), the term‘sustainable development’[1] has gained currency in public discourses. This notion of sustainable development was given further impetus by the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and subsequent summits contributing to an exponential growth of interest in issues of sustainability in academic and public discourses over the last two decades.

Organisational practice is one of the many social fields which have been permeated by discourses of sustainability. An increasing number of organisations have produced voluntary reports (differently labelled as ‘sustainability reports’, ‘CSR[2] reports’, ‘environmental reports’, etc.) in which they account for the social and environmental sustainability impacts of their activities. A common basis for such accounting is known as the ‘triple bottom line’- ‘profit, people, planet’ (Elkington, 2004) - which seeks to account for financial profitability alongside an organisation’s social and ecological impacts. CSR and organisational self-reporting of CSR activitieshave been analysed by a wealth of social and environmental accounting academic literature which has differently seen this, at one end of the spectrum, as encouraging attempts to engage in social change (Burchell and Cook, 2006) and, at the other end, as self-promotion exercises (Bhatia, 2012a) and ‘greenwashing’ opportunities through which organisations seek a social licence to operate vis-à-vis public opinion (Laine, 2009).

Over the last few years, Integrated Reporting (henceforth IR) hasemerged as a new organisational practice whereby organisational disclosures on social and environmental performance and impactsare incorporated with economic and financial information (some of which is a legal requirement) in one document. In this sense, IR can be seen as a hybrid text which brings together different discursive practices, by conflating financial, social, and environmental reports, each of which may perform different functions (public relations tool, legal and financial document), aims to achieve different objectives (appealing to potential investors, retaining current shareholders and winning or retaining other economically powerful stakeholders), gives a stage to different speakers, and addresses different hearers. Moreover, IR can be seen as a ‘sounding box’ for a polyphonic narrative (Bakhtin and Holquist, 1981) which is voiced by different organisational and societal actors (such as the company’s chairman, its CEO, the board of directors, as well as auditors/certifiers, stakeholders, etc.).

Although still a recent development and, in most countries, a voluntary practice, IR has gained momentum with the emergence of the International Integrated Report Council (IIRC), which has defined guidelines for the production of IR and which, de facto, has been driving the agenda for a global standardisation of IR (Humphry et al. 2015)[3]. As part of an active campaign of communication about the developments and potential of IR, the IIRC has showcased a number of examples of IR best practice on a database publically available online [4]. Drawing from this database, we analyse a sample of IR documents to examine how discourses of sustainability are articulated with specific regards to their interplay with financial and economic discourses. Our main aim is to identify how the recontextualisation (a concept on which we elaborate further below) of discourses of environmental and social sustainability has occurred in the IRs produced by early adopters.

The contribution of this paper is twofold: first, it bridges accounting and linguistic disciplines which, as pointed out by Grant and Iedema (2005), have so far made littlesynergic use of each other’s analytical strength and practical applications. Second, it contributes critical insights to both disciplines by highlighting how recontextualisation can act as a colonising practice of dominant discourses in the process of institutionalisation of the current IR model.The remainder of this paper will develop as follows: in section 2 we outline our theoretical approach to recontextualisation and genre hybridization. Data and methods are discussed in section 3 whilst in section 4 we present and discuss our findings. Section 5 provides some concluding remarks.

2Recontextualizing discourses and hybridizing genres: a theoretical approach

A large body of critical literature has theorised discourse as ‘language in use’ to account for the fact that texts do not exist in isolation but, as they are produced and interpreted for specific purposes, they must be seen in a dialogical relation with society (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997; van Dijk 1993). From this stance, texts can be conveniently differentiated in genres to account for the way in which the use of language is associated with specific sets of communicative events or purposes and shared by the members of specific discourse communities (Bhatia, 1993; Swales, 1990). A text can therefore be seen as belonging to a certain genre in that it is characterised by, or expected to be recognisable via, certain structural and stylistic features, in order to perform certain social functions in the specific ‘field of action’ in which the text is produced or consumed. For example, a magazine advertisement will typically have features, purposes, and audiences which are distinct from, say, those of a piece of legislation, a medicine textbook, etc. Different genres of discourse are also defined by the context of the communicative situation made up of Setting, Participants, Social Acts, Goals, etc. and macro/micro contextual models subjectively held by participants about the communicative situation (van Dijk, 2014).

Whilst the institutionalisation of certain discursive practices can contribute to the association of specific genres with specific discourses, genres and discourses are never rigidly fixed since topics, meanings, and discursive practices can be reformulated and transformed by moving across texts and fields in processes of hybridisation of genres and (de-)recontextualisation of discourses.Fairclough (2003) regards recontextualisation as a process that occurs through systematic movement of discourses along a ‘chain’ of rather stable and institutionalised genres. He uses the term hybridity to describe the blurring of boundaries between genres, discourses and social functions, and the term interdiscursivity to account for both the relation between different genres and discourses coexisting in a text and the ‘travelling’ of texts along the chain of genres[5]. Furthermore, in line with his dialectical-relational approach to discourse and society, for Fairclough, the recontextualisation of certain categories of discourse into new genres can also be seen as an index of the transformation of the whole relationship between distinct social fields and meanings associated with certain social practices or network of practices. Fairclough relates these changes to macro contexts of historical and social change which he sees primarily driven by power dynamics. This way, recontextualisation can be read as the semiotic relation of hegemony between discourses and, at the same time, as a tool whereby some social actors can achieve hegemony through the reordering of discourses, the resemioticization of meanings, the colonisation of practices, and the closure of voices (cf. Habermas, 1984; Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999; Iedema, 1999; Iedema, 2001).

From a similar perspective, (Wodak, 2011) sees recontextualization as ‘one of the salient linguistic processes governing historical change’(p. 629). For Wodakrecontextualisation amounts to

[s]patial and temporal relationships between texts […] whereby texts (and the discourses, genres and arguments which they deploy) move between […] different contexts, and are subject to transformations whose nature depends upon the relationships and differences between such contexts(ibid).

Wodak argues that recontextualisation ‘is concretely manifested in the intertextuality and interdiscursivity of texts’ and it is typically realised through

the mixing of ‘new’ recontextualized elements and ‘old’ elements, such as particular words, expressions, arguments, topoi, rhetorical devices and so forth, discourses and genres (p.630).

Processes of recontextualisation have been the focus of considerable work in the analysis of organizational discourses. From the perspective of different professional practices (including accounting), Bhatia (2010) offers an elaboration on the notion of intertextuality and interdiscursivity which he views as ‘tactical appropriations of all forms of semiotic resources across texts, genres, social practices, and cultures […] to achieve ‘private intentions’ (p. 37). For Bhatia (2012b) such appropriation can occur via different practices of recontextualisation, reframing, resemioticisation, and reformulation of discourses which can result in hybrid texts where different genres are ‘mixed’, ‘embedded’, or ‘bent’ (p.25) to realise intended meanings. For example, in a study focussing on corporate disclosure of 15 Hong Kong Stock Exchange listed companies, Bhatia (2012c) contends that companies tend to merge two distinct discourses (Accounting and Public Relations) functional to two distinct purposes (reporting financial data and promoting the company’s image respectively) in one single text (the annual report). Bhatia argues that the strategic combination of legally required and factual data on the one hand, and the rhetorical and sentiment-led language on the other results in a hybrid and mixed genre and that, crucially,

such textual proximity is likely to lend marketing and public relations discourse the same factual reliability and hence credibility that is often presupposed from the use of numerical data (p. 396).

Building on the aforementioned discussion, in this paper we approach the analysis of IR as:

a)a hybrid text comprising distinct financial, economic, social, and environmental discourses realised through different genres, narratives, styles, and registers;

b)a new discursive practice emerging out of the ‘institutional swirl’ (Higgins et al., 2014) in which different vested interests compete to establish an order of discourses of sustainability in the field of accounting; and

c)a communicative event defined by a contextual model of knowledge about setting, participants, and goals (as summarised in Table 1).

From these stances we aim to address the following research questions:

• How do discourses of sustainability interplay with other discourses in the IRs of early adopters analysed?
• How are such discourses specifically articulated and circulated in the hybrid context of the IR genre?

Table 1 A contextual model of IR as a communicative situation

Setting (Place and time) / -Internal production/external consumption
-Previous financial year
Participants (Identities, Roles, Relations) / -Organisational ‘we’; chairman, CEO, board of directors, auditors/certifiers, stakeholders addressing current and perspective investors
Social Acts, Goals / -Providing public information about the company
-Complying with legal requirements
-Accounting for organisations’ strategy and activities
-Building/maintaining shareholders’ trust

3Data and methods

Our data come from the IIRC online database which, at the time of our search in late 2014, contained 92 examples of reports released by a total of 72 different organisations in relation to the financial years 2011, 2012, and 2013. This database was selected because, in effect, reports wereendorsed by the IIRC as good examples of the then emerging IR practices, examples that other adopters might chose to follow [6].

From the IIRC database we selected a sample of 34 reports based on the criteria that the company publishing the report had to have a report available on the IIRC database for at least two of the three-year range covered at the time by the search engine (2011-2013) to ensure a degree of methodological consistency. The corpus of reports represents a good sample of different industries including telecommunications, financial services, oil, pharmaceutical, estate management, food, mining, and energy. A list of organisations, documents and relevant details is provided in the appendix. Documents were analysed at ‘thematic’ (or macro) and ‘in-depth’ (or micro) linguistic levels (Krzyżanowski, 2010).

Each report was downloaded in PDF format and initially examined at a macro-level in its combination of texts, figures, charts, diagrams, financial data, and pictures for two purposes. The first purpose was to yield a taxonomy of the different functional sections, ‘voices’, (sub)genres, and macro discursive themes that made up each IR. The second purpose was to assess the distribution of discourses of sustainability across and within each document and their main relations with different functional sections. To achieve this objective, we traced the lemma sustain* through the ‘concordance plot’ tool in Antconc(Anthony, 2012) (see below for details). We also used indexes or tables of content as stated in each IR as proxies for how discourses were ‘ordered’.

At this stage, a preliminary analysis enabled us to establish that, although textual and other data were idiosyncratically organised, two main sections were clearly distinguishable in each IR analysed. These supported different functions: a section containing the organisation’s financial statements (performing a legal requirement) and a section discussing the organisation in relation to ‘governance’ and ‘marketplace’ narratives (which we primarily regard as fulfilling broader accountability or public relations functions).

The financial data section contained: the annual financial report; information on boards of directors (hierarchy, biographies, etc.); factual information including how the report was compiled (compliance with standards); and an audit and assurance section. As thisinformation required by regulations follows a conventional format, uses technical terms, and largely relies on figures, it falls outside the scope of our research aims (i.e. providing insights on the discursive articulations of sustainability) and, therefore, was excluded from our linguistic analysis. Instead, we concentrated on the more flexible and lesser regulated ‘governance’ and ‘marketplace’ sections to unpack discourses of sustainability in terms of their semantic and discursive features (see next section).

PDFs were subsequently converted into TXT format to conduct an in-depth textual analysis. At this stage, our analytical concern was the identification of discourses of sustainability, their co-articulation with(in) other discourses, and their specific linguistic realisations. We conducted our in-depth analysis on discourse-pragmatic levels and lexical-semantic, aiming to combine a heuristic approach in the former with corpus linguistic methods in the latter[7].

At a discursive-pragmatic level the analysis followed Wodak et al.’s (2009) multilevel model focusing on: epistemic orientation of statements; argumentation schemes or frames; linguistic strategies (e.g. justification); topoi (i.e. implicit/explicit assumptions or premises that warrant an argument). At a lexical-semantic level we focused on systematic linguistic features through which arguments were realised. To do so, we initially conducted a corpus analysis with Antcon to trace occurrences of the lemma sustain* and their concordance. We examined the context or collocation of each occurrence (by making use of the KWIC tool in Antcon) to map a semantic field of sustain* aimed at defining who or what was represented as ‘(un)sustainable’ and whom or what ‘sustainability’ was attributed to.

4Findings

4.1Thematic analysis

The ‘governance’ and ‘marketplace’ sections of the reports typically contained a presentation/discussion of the organisation (‘who we are’); its line of business (‘what we do’); its position in the market (‘where we are’); its performance and business model (‘what we have done and how’); its strategy and vision for the future and its model of risk management (‘where we want to go, how and at what cost’). Embedded within the ‘governance’ and ‘marketplace’ sections (usually in early parts of these sections), most documents featured two distinctive texts recognisable as the Chairperson’s and the Chief Executive’s statements. These typically consisted of a ‘letter to shareholders’ reporting on the company performance and its future strategy in a way that rhetorically validated the organisation’s narratives through a ‘leadership voice’. A summary of the main discursive themes, genres, voices, and semiotic realisations found in the ‘governance’ and ‘marketplace’ sections is presented in Table 2.